Growing Pains
by kage713
Summary: Alessa Gillespie hits puberty, and starts to go through some...interesting changes. Along with them comes new desires, and new ways of viewing old parts of her life. What will this mean for the rest of Silent Hill?


One morning, flooded with the bleak, shivering twilight to which it was accustomed for the vast majority of its dismal semi-existence, Silent Hill was treated to a brand new batch of screams from its young mistress Alessa as she awoke from her crazed nightmares to a torrent of blood trickling down her smooth, pale thighs from a place she so rarely considered without massive anxiety and pain. Of course, considering that it was a place whose entire reality was based on the disturbingly warped mind of a brutally tortured nine year old girl, neither blood nor screams were decidedly uncommon. However, this was no comfort to the dark-haired youth, as she sprang from her stained hospital bed as if it were on fire and shakily traced a hand up the trail of blood, smearing the thick, somewhat gritty liquid down her hand and clothed arm as she followed it to its source, screams having already died down to a pained, dead-sounding whimper.

".....No....please, it can't be..." the little girl choked out through her sobs as a cursory brush over the wellspring of her exsanguination proved to be the origin she had so feared. So many years ago, after that....bad man...had hurt her so terribly, she had bled in such a way, from the same...place. But hadn't she stopped him? Hadn't she dealt with him so that he could never do this to her again? Then how...how had this happened?

Legs unsteady, tiny childlike hand dripping with rust-tinged blood, Alessa wandered out of the tiny hospital room where she had made something of a habit of sleeping when the feelings of exhaustion managed to dominate her body, and into the filthy hallway where she knew the town's twisted nurses to stalk restlessly. She remembered them all too well as they had once been; the halls of Alchemilla were as cold and antiseptic as its employees, the chill abrading her scorched and blackened flesh as she was wheeled into the room she would stay in for so long, under the care of those women who seemed to delight in turning up their noses at the horrifying thing she had become after the cult's torture. Despite her decidedly unfriendly feelings towards the now-demonic medical professionals, the frightened child was aware that their job dealt with...such matters, as had been revealed to her when tests of her roasted body revealed to the doctors that there had been additional severe bruising and tearing to her vagina; or, rather, what remained of it. Despite the fact that she felt little pain, besides an odd ache in her lower abdominal region, the frightened girl knew that something terrible must have happened, and she still retained an odd feeling from her youthful innocence that the best thing to do when she thought something was wrong with her was to go to a doctor. And these nurses, mindless and corrupted though they might now be, still filled that role in her mind. Stumbling down the smooth tiled passage, she finally encountered one of the grotesquely feminine creatures, a line of viscous pus dripping down from a gash across her swollen cleavage in a way that reminded Alessa of her own problem.

Briefly summoning up her powers over the matters of the town, the desperate youth focused her energy into restoring the nurse's mind, and with it, her medical knowledge. As it was, the warped creature standing hunched over before her could as soon give her medical advice as it could play a Bach concerto on the nearest organ. The change it brought upon the woman was immediately obvious; where just moments before she had been stumbling about jerkily, a vacantly savage fire in her dull, dark eyes, now some sense of movement had returned to her filth-caked, voluptuous form, straightening her posture as she stood straight, looking about with a definitely shocked expression. The decay of her flesh, as well as the deformation of her face had all faded away, the bandages falling from newly-flawless skin to drift to the grungey floor like discarded feathers. Hair that had been missing for so long grew back swiftly, a lustrous, thick honey-blonde that somehow managed to gleam brilliantly even in the dim lighting of the corrupted Alchemilla Hospital.

".....I....who are you?" the newly-restored nurse asked roughly, throat feeling strange from the speech after so many years of nothing more than inhuman yowls and whimpering. The little girl looking up at her, teary-eyed and eager for her attention, was a strange sight in what remained of her old workplace, and reminded her vaguely of a child she had seen around town...Alessa.

"My name is Alessa Gillespie...I'm nine years old, and I'm a patient here. I just woke up, and there's...all this bleeding, from my....no-no area....I think a man might've...hurt me again, while I was asleep. Can you please....look for me?"

The plaintive, youthful sound of Alessa's voice drew the grotesque caretaker's sympathy in a way that any scared child's might have. To her surprise, she felt tears welling in her mutated eyes as they had not in several decades of pseudo-life since what had happened to the town. Though she had not been fully conscious, the nurse had maintained some rudimentary awareness of the passing of time and the pain of her own immortal stagnation. This hospital, once the source of her livelihood, had become a hell, all due to...something that had happened. How had she become awake again? How did Alessa, for that matter? Was she a different Alessa than the one she had remembered, or was this little girl somehow the same after so many years?

"I'm so happy so meet you, Alessa. I'm Courtney....Courtney Havercroft. Of....of course I'll look, honey. Just...tell me about anything that you can think of. Do you remember seeing a man you made you feel nervous, that might've done something?" Alessa's vague reference to an 'again' worried the blonde somewhat; had the child been a victim of a sexual assault before? Could it perhaps have been...that Pyramid thing?

Though many of Courtney's memories of the past years were fuzzy, her experience with the strange masked creature stood out sharply in her mind. She could not have pinpointed the exact day or week or month of the encounter; time seemed to stand still in Silent Hill, with the only break in the gloomy monotony of the endless tyrannising pale grey fog being those brief periods of bloody, screaming torment that fell upon the town's structuring seemingly unpredictably every few hours. And it was during one such time of hell that she heard his approach echo through the cavernous halls of Alchemilla. It was not an entirely uncommon sound; that jarring scrape of the beastly man's knife along the grimy linoleum, the ominous thuds of his large, thickly-booted feet, those came often to her ears, as the being known as Pyramid Head tended to stalk the hospital on a fairly regular basis. All of the nurses had seen what came of his appearances; each time, the broken, anguished bodies of one or two of their peers lay sprawled in the syrupy scarlet pools of their own blood and shredded flesh, the distorted women moaning piteously as they attempted to rise to their feet, only to find that their shattered frames would not permit them to be upright. Faced with such damage, those who were not victims of the slaughterous Pyramid's lust could do little to help those who were; it was a convenient, yet at times sorrowful, truth of the town that none of them could die. They would assemble, the stale air peppered with their soft, feminine-sounding murmurs that served as their only conversation, to stand a strange and sleepless vigil over their fallen former coworkers, and watch as slowly, painfully, their bodies reknit themselves and they could once more take up their senseless wandering.

Somehow, Courtney had had the fortune to have missed being in the wrong place at the right time during any of Pyramid Head's torture sprees in the past; however, with what little was left of her sentience, she was aware that her turn would come eventually. And come it did; when the echoes of screeching metal met her ears in that instance, they were right around the corner, and headed in her direction. Thoughts too cloudy to force herself to run, to make some futile effort to escape what she knew was coming, the undead medical practitioner did the only thing she could bring herself to do. Moaning in terror, her grip tightened on the solid, if somewhat rusty, pipe she carried around as a weapon, and she did her best to steel her resolve to fight off the beast as best she could. Yet she could never have been prepared for what was coming; the horrific appearance of the butcherly demon was more terrible than anything she had expected. Slow-moving though it...no, he....might have been, his frame was one of sheer malevolent power; a body that stood well over seven feet tall and seemed to be composed of almost nothing but grotesquely swollen, potent muscle. A garment of bloodied skin was draped loosely around his hips, seemingly designed so that it would be easy to remove. The dominant facet of the being's appearance, however, was undoubtedly the massive triangular metal helm that completely obscured his face, leaving his thoughts, if he had any, unknown to any who had the misfortune to be gazing up at him. Though she couldn't see the direction in which he was gazing, a slight course correction in its movement clued Courtney in to the realization that it was headed directly for her. Trembling like a lamb in the maw of a crocodile, she watched as with one mighty thrust the being drove his Great Knife point-down through the floor, freeing up his hand and allowing him to move towards her at a somewhat quicker pace. Groaning, she swung her pipe at his stomach as he came within range, but the Red Pyramid was almost entirely unaffected, ripping the pipe from her grip with one hand and grabbing her around the neck with the other, hoisting her bodily into the air.


End file.
